Siddarth Varadarjan, the Wire’s founding editor and senior journalist held a condolence meeting on Monday in the wake of assassination of Shujaat Bukhari at the Press Club of India.
“Long before Shujaat Bukhari was assassinated on June 14, his character was assassinated multiple times by the people in Kashmir, India, and Pakistan,” he said.
The Kashmir Life quoted him as saying, “When a person like Shujaat Bukhari with all the reason, rationality and good sense at his command can be labelled on Indian TV channels as soft separatist, pro-terrorist, pro-Pakistani…when his entire life’s work can be dismissed in such a cavalier fashion by people who know nothing at all about Jammu and Kashmir or politics and history of this country, the space for hidden forces to engage in active terrorism, over which you have no control, expands.”
He was also reported to have asked the journalists to deal with people’s arguments, and to respect such public discourse and opinions.
The Wire editor earlier flew to Srinagar to attend the assassinated editor’s funeral. In his address, he beseeched the TV anchors and the journalists to ‘think a hundred times’ before labeling anyone as a pro-pakistani, or a pro-terrorist, saying that there were real life consequences of such labels.
Syed Shujaat Bukhaari was assassinated on June 14, a day before Eid-Ul-Fitr at Press Enclave, Srinagar by three unidentified gunmen a few minutes before Iftar. Thousands of academicians, journalists and intellectuals attended his funeral held in Kreeri, his home village.
